Currently — July 27, 2023: President Biden plans to deliver a speech on climate Thursday.

What you can do, currently.

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The weather, currently.

President Biden plans to deliver a speech on climate Thursday. With record-breaking heat waves and a cascade of escalating impacts looming from new scientific evidence, there’s a growing push from activists, scientists, and politicians calling on him to declare a climate emergency.

Jamie Henn, one of the co-founders of the group 350.org, made the case with a thread on why a Climate Emergency Declaration matters so much. Just like during the Covid emergency, a climate emergency could compel and pay industry to devote their massive production resource toward the public good. Instead of vaccines, they’d be making heat pumps, wind turbines, and solar panels. An emergency declaration could also put a hard cap on fossil fuel use and force Exxon, Chevron, and other US-based oil companies to cap their leaking methane and retool their infrastructure towards green energy for real, with no greenwashing. In recent days, the LA Times Editorial Board also joined the bandwagon, calling for President Biden to regulate the fossil fuel industry out of existence as soon as possible.

The Center for Biological Diversity has been one of the organizations spearheading the effort since Biden took office, outlining the dozens of special executive powers that could be put to work fighting the climate crisis should Biden flip the switch to emergency mode.

I was super inspired by the great Rebecca Solnit’s latest essay — that when depressing climate news hits we feel tempted toward nihilism and defeat. But this is the system talking — the system that profits and benefits from the status quo — and it takes actual energy to see the proof that a better world is possible. Right now, we need Joe Biden to be a leader to show us that proof, and to inspire us to use the news of climate disaster as fuel for remaking our world.

Now is the time for Biden to declare a climate emergency. The choice isn’t between hope or doom, the choice is between survival and not.

—Eric Holthaus